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Monday, June 9, 2008
Dad and the worm story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I will miss my father the rest of my days. It’s been five months since he passed away and there hasn’t been a day in which I haven’t taken pause to remember something about him.
Many of them are about hunting or fishing.
With Father’s Day coming up, those memories have been bubbling up pretty frequently. And many times they’ve been brought on by even the smallest of circumstance.
One hit me the other day when I was at a store which sold nightcrawlers.
It made me think of the days as a kid in Wisconsin when me and my three brothers (but I did most of the work, by the way) sold nightcrawlers to local fishermen. We had a prime location right there at the corner of Brown Boulevard and First Street in Rothschild, next door to the post office that hired me every winter to shovel the front walk.
We put a sign up in the front yard and sold the big worms by the dozen. Business was brisk on Thursdays and Fridays as fishermen readied for weekend trips to the Wisconsin lake country to the north. Of course, it provided us with all the worms we needed for our own fishing trips, many of them for sunfish and bullheads at the Wisconsin River, a 5-minute bike ride from the house.
My father fashioned an old 50-gallon oil drum with a door and lock and buried that sucker in the ground behind the house. We put the nightcrawlers in there to keep them cool through the summer.
Funny, how during that time we needed a lock on the worm box to keep people from stealing our prized worms but never — I mean never — locked the doors to the house.
We made a little money, but the fun was in catching the nightcrawlers, which emerged from the ground every night, and in particularly large numbers during or after a rain. With a flashlight gripped by my incisors I would shine the light at the ground and pick them up, gently pulling them out of their holes so as not to break them off.
I remember once when us young entrepreneurs realized we could dramatically improve our botton line if we helped Mother Nature in bringing those big ol’ worms to the surface. So we watered the lawn — a lot. The wetter the ground, the more nightcrawlers would come out at night.
We had one of the greenest lawns in the neighborhood nearly every summer.
Dad pretty much left the worm biz up to us. That is, until he realized we were running up the water bill. He put a stop to the watering and our inventory plummetted.
Then one day, with our annual two-week family vacation around July 4th just days away, Dad asked about the worms. Did we have enough for vacation? “No, we’re sold out” was the answer.
The watering began again, and we never heard another word about it.
For many outdoors enthusiasts it was dear ol’ Dad who introduced them to hunting and fishing. What’s your best story in the field with your father, and how important was it in shaping your interest in the outdoors?
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